Anne: Hi everybody. It's Anne Duffy and welcome to Dental Entrepreneur, the Future of Dentistry's podcast. I am so happy that you're here today and I'm really excited about my special guest. He's a good friend. We've only known each other a couple of years, but boy he is everywhere and he's always for everyone.
Gary Bird, so great to see you today. How are you? Good to
Gary: have you too. And yes, I love Anne and your energy. And the first time I met you, you came on my podcast and you just were overflowing with positive energy and just super nice. And then I asked you hard questions and then you were like still super nice and still liked me.
So I was like, every time I bump into you, anytime I come across anything and related, I'm always a automatic yes and positive about it.
Anne: Thank you. I know I was pretty well stunned by some of those answers that I answered that I'd never answered for. No one ever asked me.
I know you've got a couple of podcasts, Gary, we'll talk about that and they'll be in the show notes. But yeah, you do ask hard questions it was actually freeing to be able to answer some of those things I, actually appreciate that. before we get started let me, tell everybody that's listening a little bit about you.
Gary Bird is the founder of SMC National built almost entirely through referrals. SMC used the data driven approach to maximize growth. Prioritizing his team landed SMC on INCS 5000 in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Gary hosts multiple podcasts, Dental Marketing Theory, Dental Rift, Dental Marketing Goat, and Full Arch Advantage.
He is a nationwide speaker in the dental and entrepreneurial world. Free time is spent serving with family through his church and worldwide giving. That makes me so happy, Gary. So it is an honor to have you with me today. And just even reading your bio makes me just adore you even more.
Gary: I
appreciate it. It's an honor to be here.
Anne: I was looking at your website. So SMC national, When did you start this company and tell me a little bit of why you started this company.
Gary: Yeah, definitely. On my podcast, Dental Marketing Theory, that's our more popular podcast.
It's the number one podcast for dental marketing. people can go check that out. But the question I ask everybody, and I think I asked you this question, is how did you end up in the dental industry? And it's pretty because everybody who's non clinical is here by accident. And when I say everybody, I mean in the high 90 percent.
98, 99 percent. Meaning, Everybody's yeah, I did this thing in business. And then I stumbled into dentistry. I didn't really know a lot about it. And then I learned about it. And then now I'm stuck here and everybody loves it. And everybody stays I am no different. That's what happened to me. So I. I had a corporate job and I was in my early twenties and I didn't realize and like early on in my life, I just would do a job for a year, maybe a year and a half, and then I'd get bored and I'd quit and go get another job. then the next job was always pay a little bit better, right?
A little bit better benefits, a little more money. So I was like, okay, that's the next opportunity. And so I do that again. And then I would, a year would go by and a year and a half. And I do that again. And I did that. Yeah. Three or four times. And I thought something was wrong with me. I thought man, what in the world?
I just get so bored. I would get immensely bored and I'd have to leave because I just couldn't. Get up in the morning to go to work. Like I didn't want to go to work anymore. So I put in my two week notice, find another job and then do it over again. And finally, one day I was just like, you know what?
I'm quitting this job and I'm going to start an email marketing company. And there was a company out there that helped you do it. And this is how old I am. Is that like email marketing was like cutting edge technology at the time, people only used it for corporate communication.
No one used it for marketing yet. There was no text message marketing. Social media was only for personal use, not for business use at this time. This is in 2008. so I quit my job. It was pretty good paying for me at the time. It gave me a gas card stuff. It was comfortable. And I just quit it cold Turkey and went out and started hustling up email marketing accounts.
And then the economy crashed 2008. We're a younger audience here. if you weren't alive during that time, or if you were young during that time, businesses were shutting down left and right. Everybody knew somebody that lost their house. And a lot of people lost their houses during that time because the way the loans were structured was basically just, the payments weren't affordable.
it was so scary. But at the time, it was actually a perfect storm for me because I had a marketing solution that was 200 a month and a lot of people were still doing phonebook. And that was like 5, 000 a month. So I was like, Hey, you can cut your phone book. Cause that doesn't work anymore.
There's this thing called Google that people are using now. And I have a solution for you that you can reach back out to all of your customers via email and make your slowest day, your busiest day. So I signed up a huge book of business, had this recurring revenue coming in. It was good for me at the time.
It was very small looking back at it, but at the time it was really good for me. I just continued to do that. I started adding other services. I eventually picked up a dentist. The dentist went from 90, 000 a month to over 400, 000 a month over a couple years in a super competitive market in California.
I had no idea what I was doing or even if that, why, that was good. Or if that was a big deal in dental, no clue about anything. He introduced me some, of his dental friends, some of the dental friends introduced me to consultants. Some of the consultants introduced me to more dental practices. And the next thing we split the company.
We only worked with dentists and then COVID hit. And we lost 75 percent of our business overnight because everybody shut down. So you turn off your marketing when you shut down, no reason to market. And so we had no money and had this 20 person team. And there was no playbook for that.
It's just
Anne: yeah, you're right.
Gary: So my business partner who's worked with me for many, years, we sat down and we said, okay, so what are our options here? we didn't have any debt at the time, which I'm thankful for. So we said, we can borrow some money and that will give us, I think it was 90 days to 120 days worth of runway.
that's what we did. We took that debt out. And the reason we did that was we said, okay, what's worst case scenario, the economy doesn't start back up and who cares about a little bit of debt, right? We'll be more worried about things like food and water and stuff like that.
Or the economy will turn back on and we'll be in a really good position. And we bet on the economy starting back up. So we didn't lay anybody off. Everybody else laid everybody off.
Anne: Oh man. That's impressive.
Gary: Stupid guess. And we got lucky and we're Right.
Anne: starts from a good heart, Gary. It
Gary: does. Yeah. We were just like, look, let's just keep these guys on. no one could get jobs. You couldn't get a job. So what are we gonna do? We're gonna lay 'em off and they're gonna go on employment. And then we're going to be sitting here, what are we going to hire him back?
We're going to have money to do that. So it was just like, let's just keep them on and let's hope and pray that the economy opens back up for everybody's sake, not just for our sake, but for everybody's sake. And the economy did, things opened back up. Dentistry started to open back up and everybody needed marketing because everybody was starting at zero and we had our whole team ready to go.
Yeah. And so we quickly grew like crazy. So we grew from, 20 people we, like five X the company. We hit the Inc 5, 000 fastest growing company three years in a row. And just exploded. it was so painful at certain times and so exciting at other times.
And just like you and I were talking about before we hit record, it's Entrepreneurship is like really interesting. You're like hope and pray that you can grow and get to where you want to go. You get there and you find out there's these new levels and new devils that you have to deal with.
like, I'd never been sued before. Guess what? When you grow, you're going to be sued. I never, had people tell me they hate me and I've ruined their life because of the way that we structured things. You know what I mean? And I was like. I never thought that would happen. but on the flip side, there was a lot of good stuff to come from it.
And, a lot of things that I'm super thankful that I learned along the way. So there's the good and the bad that comes with it, but it's been super fun. We're in a really good stage right now. I'm having a lot of fun and learning a lot right now. yeah, that's where we're at.
Anne: Wow.
That's so cool. And it is true about entrepreneurship. It is a rollercoaster. You just have to hang on tight. And then also I love how you took care of your team because I know that's really important to you. And you could tell by I've talked to your team members, they really know that you have their back.
And that just makes you want to work harder. And, again, when the team is all rowing in the same direction, as you mentioned in one of the videos that there's nothing that can stop you because when one person lags behind, you're not going to leave that man behind.
You're going to pull him up there get him on the boat and get him rowing again. So love that you're in the industry and that your reputation a lot of other marketing firms because they know they can trust you and they know that you have their back. I'm just so interested in like how cemented yourself into the DSO arena, not only just with the patients, but also gathering offices.
Tell me a little bit about what you do in the DSO and why that has attracted you and why has your firm attracted the DSO market?
Gary: it's so tricky. We're in a really weird time right now, so I'm going to lay the foundation of where we're at right now, and even the term is, Doesn't really mean a whole lot right now because it can mean a lot of different things depending on who's listening.
So there's a couple things going on. Number one, you got the mega DSOs. So these are your big, DSOs, thousand locations, the Aspens, the Heartlands, right? They have internal marketing. They can use companies like SMC, like here and there, right? I work with a couple of locations that work for big DSOs that are just like, we just want to use them.
But typically they do their marketing in house, right? And then you have the really big DSOs. And these are your, like your 500 locations type DSOs and down probably like to a hundred locations. we work with some of those as well. Not all the locations, but some of the locations, same kind of scenario, but they operate a little bit differently cause they don't quite have the same resources that the mega DSOs do.
Then you get down into the 50 locations. And they operate totally different. They have an internal marketing person and they play like a hub of who they're going to help work with, like vendors, like SMC, then there's the small DSOs. And these are the two to 10 1520 locations, and they typically don't have the resources have an in house person.
Maybe one person, that's it. And they exclusively work with vendors. And it becomes very tricky, because we also work with single locations, or a lot of single locations, So the single locations, you're working with a dentist. directly, then you go up to that next level that, five, 10, 15, you might be working with a dentist, but you're probably going to be working with somebody who's part time handling marketing.
Maybe they're a hygienist that's halfway, marketing person. Then you get up to the next level. You're only working with a marketing people who think totally different than the first two. And then the next group's up you're working with marketing teams. like I had somebody emailed me today and they're like, Hey, I just had a meeting with the board and we need to be able to see this and this and do this and this, for marketing.
You know what I mean? And so they're thinking in a whole nother way. cause they have, private equity money. They're more concerned with like speed, keeping their costs down, where the first guy, the single location, Dennis guy, he's just like, how many new patients did I have this month?
That's all I care about. That's it. That's all that matters to me. there's a lot of nuances in there and very few people are willing to have these conversations. Because to be honest with you, each of those are a separate avatar. You have to market to them differently. You have to speak to them differently.
You have to manage them differently. You have to perform for them differently. And that's super hard. and It's all moving target because the guy that was a single location now is a multi location and the multi location is now smaller group and the smaller group now becomes the bigger group on you overnight and the bigger groups become the mega groups and so on and so forth.
Anne: You have to be able to know how to work with all those groups then. why somebody would use you with the experience you have and with the number of people you have and have working in all of those different scenarios at one time or another. It helps you to really focus in on the avatar, right?
who are you working for? And then, you have to be able to nuance that and give them what they need and what they want.
Gary: I think a lot of marketing companies don't want to mess with it too, because you're hanging yourself as a marketing company because it's just a matter of time until they bring it in house.
So you're slowly cooking yourself out of a job, if that makes sense, as they grow. there's a lot of nuance in there,
Anne: Wow. And, also keeping all your people cause they're trying to fight Hey, how about working for a full time
Gary: the good news is, that we still more people from the dental industry then the dental practice is still from us because we're fully remote. that's something that we really emphasize and it's hard to compete with that. Most DSOs are not virtual. Some are, some have figured it out and been like, Hey, we can be fully virtual DSO as a support group.
And then dental practices obviously aren't. we have a lot of people on our team that worked for Heartland, Aspen, have worked in office managers even clinical folks, people who've been, Director of Ops. Hygienist.
Anne: that's so cool because when you're in the trenches, it does give you a different, view, right?
it's nice to be able to have that empathy of actually knowing what your client is feeling along the way.
Gary: We have several coaches on our team. they all have in office experience. So they help us like when I go wild and I'm like no, we should do this, that I Gary, you got to remember the front desk.
They think this and they think this way. They keep us really grounded in how to operate. Cause most marketing companies have no one on their team from a dental office.
Anne: Yeah, that is really true. And dentistry is his own little silo there. It is really, relationship driven, so many nuances with, the dental office and then the mindset of the patient nobody really wants to go to the dentist.
Like to get anybody to come when they don't really wanna go to begin with. I think that's interesting. The AI thing, I know you really building your avatar with a ai. what do you mean by that?
Gary: So, an avatar is like your ideal customer. And so a lot of people struggle with this. They're like, who's my ideal customer. And a lot of dentists are like, I want bread and butter dentistry. And it's that's not avatar. An avatar isn't a person. So like a normal GP practice is typically going to attract like a 40 year old female.
They're almost always going to be female. 80 percent of medical decisions are made by females. And, from there, it's okay what other information do you have on this person? And before you used to either have to pay. Tens of thousands of dollars. Or work with a radio station that has software or something like that, and could, punch in the information and then this expensive software would spit back out.
the 40 year old female in Austin, Texas. is interested in these things, they spend this much time online, they go to these stores, they like coupons, or they don't like coupons with AI, you can actually go in and you can say, Hey, I'm a dental practice in this city.
what kind of patient should I target? And it will start to break down all the demographics, the social graphics, all that kind of stuff. And it will just spit it out to you in seconds. that's, cool. But here's the really cool part. Then you can say, all right, so what are the number one things that is going to prevent this patient from coming in?
And I would say it's probably about 90 percent accurate and I've done this live on stage in front of hundreds of people. I pick somebody from the audience and I go, okay, tell me about your practice. Okay. Your super GP office in Phoenix, Arizona. What's your avatar? Boom. It gives me all the information.
I go, is this accurate? And then, yeah, that's pretty good. Okay, good. What's the biggest obstacles. Okay. Fear. Money, time, whatever, right? Depending on the off high income areas are Less concerned about price, more concerned about time, Low income areas are going to be more concerned about costs but they have more free time, So there's a give and take there. So it breaks all that down. Then you can say to the AI, okay, I want you to give me, scripting to deal with each of these obstacles. I want you to start on the phones. And work backwards. So then it'll give you all the scripting, boom, then from there you can say, okay, now I want you to write it in an SOP for me so that way I can quickly give it to my team.
And then from there you can take apps like loom and I'm going through this really fast.
Anne: Okay. I love it. I have
Gary: more questions. I have like webinars on this and stuff, you can use app called loom on your phone where you can record. So you can record yourself or record someone on your team.
So let's say you have a doctor who's amazing at presenting treatment. Okay. You record them on loom and it gives you a transcript and then you drop it into the same chat and you could say, Hey, this is Dr. Smith's transcript of treatment presentation. I want you to build this in scripting format and then build an SOP around it to train all of my other doctors to be able to do the same.
Also, you can do all this in 10 minutes. again, I've done it on stage in front of people. And you can do it really, quickly. And then from there you can build out a whole, book on the patient journey. With all the scripting, with all your SOPs. That takes years. again, I ask in front of the audience, I go, who here has tried to do this before everybody raises their hand, who here has finished?
No one's raised their hand yet. Because it's like an endless job with this. You can do it in, a day, two days, a couple of days, and you can bang out 70, 80 percent of it. And again, it's not perfect, but it's like 70, 80, 90 percent there, depending on your office and your location.
And then you can work at the rest of the way, fairly easy.
Anne: Just tweak it, to map onto your personality or your office's personality and what you provide for patients.
That's a game changer and last year and a half that's happened, right?
Gary: That didn't exist two years ago,
Anne: it. And also what you say on the back end there's so much that goes into trying to get the right butt in the right seat, every practice has a certain idea of who they want in their chair.
also like, there's so much that, So someone's got 10 practices or 15 practices. Can you help train the marketing specialist that's there? Or do you prefer to take it all on and then just give them the reports?
How does that work with your team?
Gary: Good question. So yeah, no, we can be flexible with them. There's certain things that we have to do and there's certain things that we're willing to just be like, here, you do it, we'd rather have you do it. Typically where we draw that line and where I'd recommend people drawing that line, unless you're building your own internal company.
Now I will say, if you're building your own internal marketing team or company, so to speak the bare minimum to build your own internal marketing, this is like bare, 30, 000 a month in payroll.
That just gives you like the basics that you need to be able to move really fast, but you still have to outsource a lot of stuff too.
You don't have all the pieces yet. and you still have ad spend and you still have a marketing budget. this isn't not your marketing budget. This is on top. So if you have a 20, 000 a month marketing budget, you still have that. The labor doesn't take that away. It's just, you're not outsourcing that.
And dental really skimps on this. Like I've seen people stand up and they're like, I have a thousand locations. And then we have 2000 dentists and we have 5, 000 hygienists and we have this many administrative and they go, and we have a five person marketing team. I was talking to somebody who works for A DSO, they have 800 locations, 6, 700, 800 locations, and they have a four person marketing team.
And I was like, dude, we have 500 locations or whatever, how many locations we work with, and we have a 80 person marketing team just to give you an idea, , so the way I would answer your question though is that. what we like to do is the thing that you can outsource.
lead generation is the thing you can outsource because you don't have to be in office to be able to do that. The things we can't, outsource. It's not really possible. It's like your branding, on social media, your internal videos more Google reviews. Holding your team accountable to answering the phone properly.
I can give you the data on it, but I can't really hold your team accountable. They don't care unless you care. And so those are the kinds of things that we typically say, Hey, marketing person that's internal. You manage these things and own these things and then we'll make sure to fill the top of the funnel and help you work those patients through into buying treatment.
Anne: Wow. It just makes perfect sense. So to use a company that's got as many people as you have that are actually experts talking to each other because we just realized and we were saying Chat GPT just came along. This thing is going so fast. You have to have somebody that's like literally on the inside circle to understand how it changes from day to day and to get the best bang for your buck.
when you really break it down like that, it just so much sense. I know that we're running short on time here. I want to Make sure that people can get to some of your podcasts and your videos
Gary: go.
So there's two places you can go. So either one, you can find me.
So I have a personal brand and I'm very active on social media. So you can go to the Gary bird on any social media platform or my website, the Gary bird. com, the Gary bird, and all four letters all spelled properly and the easy way. And then the company, if you want to go check out our company is SMC national.
Sam, Mary, Charlie, national. com. And you can go check that out. And either one of those, I'm happy to talk to you. I meet with my team every single day all the leadership team. And we go over every single account so I'm very, connected to what's going on day to day.
Anne: That is so cool.
I just learned a lot about you today, Gary, and I didn't ask you any hard questions, but just wait till the next time.
Gary: Yes.
Anne: Even more prepared surprise you with that. Because I know that you've got a lot in there for all of us to get to know you and your company. Thanks so much for being here.
Thanks for what you do for the industry. I, love your generosity of okay. So much for having me on. It's really a pleasure. so lucky
Gary: to have met you. And then
Anne: we're gonna get into the show notes, but we're going to continue to do that I'm going to go ahead and end the show with a little bit of wiping off some of our stuff.
And I'm sure there's going to be some comments, but
